/🧊/snarf-peergos.chat/index.html

Peergos News Snippets

2025-11-14

https://app.element.io/#/room/#peergos-chat:matrix.org

@saved.in:/hyperpost/🌐/🧊/snarf-peergos.chat/

Ian Preston

Two new features: (1) The main page now has a "mirror" tab which allows you to request/pay for storage and mirror an account from another server. So if you're self hosting, you can use this to backup on peergos.net. This also means you can login and use the bandwidth of any mirror. (2) The second is a "migration" page under the user menu. This gives you the ability to easily migrate to a different server (a single click once the mirror is complete). This means you no longer need to use the CLI to migrate, and also that you can migrate to peergos.net (previously you needed CLI access on our servers to do this).

A mirror is updated every minute to check for changes.

blue.water
being honest, peergos is the best cloud storage provider for me i.e. my use-case, and i would be able to confidently recommend it to anyone and everyone without any second thoughts when this and ios app will be available. being a privacyguides.org user, i will also try to push peergos to the #1 cloud storage provider from it's current #3 ranking, imo so many people are missing out on peergos and i would like to change that. would you be comfortable, providing the provider's name? it's completely understandable if you would you like to do that only when everything's ready.

Thank you for the wonderful comments. The S3 provider is Scaleway.

Can you elaborate on the "bandwidth of any mirror" portion? I think I mostly understand this but can you clarify that if logging in on a mirror, downloads are fulfilled from the mirror's data store and not from the home server's store. But, uploads are written to the home server, bypassing the mirror (until the data gets mirrored to it on the next cycle). Correct?

Yep, that's correct. If a download is of something not mirrored yet, then it will fallback to the home server.

This does not prevent that if you care about your data, you should keep a backup of them and not rely 100% on the service provider. In addition to underlying storage, shit happens and a bug could bork all data in peergos/proton/whatever.

ofcourse, 100% agreed

Good news! I've found an S3 provider that will work with our current pricing for another replica. That would be 2 replicas across 2 regions from 2 providers. The unit economics doesn't work with most S3 providers. We are cheaper than the others. For clarity here is the pricing I see from the UK - we're almost half the price of Ente and cheaper than Proton too. Peergos Annual 200 GB 36 GBP Ente Annual 200 GB 60 GBP Proton Annual 200 GB 39.5 GBP It will take some engineering to enable, but it is high in the queue.

being honest, peergos is the best cloud storage provider for me i.e. my use-case, and i would be able to confidently recommend it to anyone and everyone without any second thoughts when this and ios app will be available. being a privacyguides.org user, i will also try to push peergos to the #1 cloud storage provider from it's current #3 ranking, imo so many people are missing out on peergos and i would like to change that. would you be comfortable, providing the provider's name? it's completely understandable if you would you like to do that only when everything's ready.

I've now implemented support for S3 glacier, which this needs. My plan is to just run another Peergos node and use the built-in mirroring feature to mirror to Scaleway (which anyone else could also use to independently run a mirror for themselves on Glacier). I just need to convince myself we are not going to get shafted by the min 30 day billing duration.

For example a dedicated server from some provider that leases out dedicated HW. Roll your own service stack is then a requirement, naturally, but ZFS + Minio + Peergos things should be rather easy to setup and maintain. I checked Hezner for reference even though I don't personally like them very much, and they have e.g. 32 core, 256 RAM, 2x 8TB NVMe, 14 x 22 TB SATA enterprise HDD setups for ~400€ /mo. If you have less than 100 TB currently, you could probably live with 8x22TB, which would yield ~130 TB of usable space for ~200€/mo price range...

---

chmedlychmed

These are good thoughts. But it also brings to mind some of the promises that P2P made to me years ago. Too bad the users (or a subset of users) can't act as another backup layer for the data.

With Peergos any user can also run their own live mirror(s) using the built-in mirror function. Or indeed request/pay for a mirror on a 3rd party server using the new UI additions.

But in architectural sense it would kind of make sense, if peergos' natural ability to distribute the data could be utilized somehow... like say, you could just throw enough cheap storage boxes as a backend and the data would always be on some S3 + at least one of the storage boxes automatically. Then the user might do their own things on top of that. But this would require then some logic to rebalance and fetch the data that might be missing due to decommissioning of a storage box etc... Additionally it would be a lot of cheaper to try to primarily utilize the bandwidth of that kind of boxes where e.g. 1 Gbps connection is included in the price, instead of paying separately for S3 egress for all read operations.

This sounds fun, but I think is quite difficult with heterogeneous storage sizes and bandwidth sizes.

When we first started peergos we wanted to do that, similar to Wuala.

But Wuala always cheated anyway and had a central copy of everything.

chmedlychmed

I was thinking about something like Storj. If I have some extra drives on a server and could (perhaps out of the goodness of my heart) offer them up to the "peergos friend network" and blocks would be stored on them for both backup AND geodistribution/bandwidth advantages, the goodness of my heart would be glad.

Ian Preston

Yep, wuala got bought by Lacie, and then shut down. They pioneered the cryptree structure that we use an improved version of for access control.

chmedlychmed

So Wuala was open source?

Ian Preston

No sadly. They never open sourced, just published a few papers. Despite claiming they would be open source

chmedlychmed

Jassuko
cchmedlychmed: yeah, but it would need EXTRA fancy balancing and redundancy things to account for random stuff vanishing from the network. But I could easily contribute some 10 TB + ~1 Gbps myself as well, lol.

Yup, it's the issue with regular IPFS. We would need a system for pinning and keeping track of the pinning.

Ian Preston

In general also I think people don't like storing data from people they don't know, for quite good legal reasons.

blue.water

Jassuko
But in architectural sense it would kind of make sense, if peergos' natural ability to distribute the data could be utilized somehow... like say, you could just throw enough cheap storage boxes as a backend and the data would always be on some S3 + at least one of the storage boxes automatically. Then the user might do their own things on top of that. But this would require then some logic to rebalance and fetch the data that might be missing due to decommissioning of a storage box etc... Additionally it would be a lot of cheaper to try to primarily utilize the bandwidth of that kind of boxes where e.g. 1 Gbps connection is included in the price, instead of paying separately for S3 egress for all read operations.

i personally think, keeping things "intentionally" simple & straightforward is the way to go, not only helps in scaling, but also doesn't restrict us to tech enthusiasts users. novice users can also just signup, pay for the service and move on with their life, with the added benefits of e2e (privacy), something like what proton drive does. same goes for the p2p integration as the backup idea

Jassuko

Ian Preston
In general also I think people don't like storing data from people they don't know, for quite good legal reasons.

Yeah. True. I currently only contribute to seeding some torrents for various open source projects and sharing some large-ish public map related datasets.

Ian Preston

It's only been a week, but there is a new release out folks! It has an important timezone fix for sync, as well as 1000x faster host dir listing when creating a sync on desktop. https://github.com/Peergos/web-ui/releases/tag/v1.13.0

Release Sync improvements · Peergos/web-ui - GitHub

This release makes updates on Windows easier by using a fixed app UUID. It also makes listing host

chmedlychmed

Once the social aspect of peergos gets going then we will all get to know each other better. And then perhaps we can make some "storage groups" that we can join.

It never snows when there's -30 ºC or worse outside. :)

Ian Preston

I grew up in Australia. :-)

chmedlychmed

Well weather aside, FOSDEM does look like fun. I don't know that I can make a trip like that make sense either from a schedule or financial standpoint. But I like the idea that Peergos will develop community.

hosted apps

chmedlychmed

One idea that has been a recurring thing as I try to build my next iteration of self hosted apps is the idea of hot and cold storage. But the idea is to put that in the control of the user. For instance, I sometimes upload fairly large video files that are for transfer to another person. I don't need those files to be replicated out to all the backups. And they don't need to be archived; I'm probably going to delete them once the project is over. What is important is the upload and download speed. So another way of thinking about hot-cold might be fast-slow. Or working-archive. My hope is that Peergos will eventually have the capability for multiple "storage backends" but I'm bringing it up now because I wonder... how does the current conversation about glacier storage relate to what I'm describing?

Fri, Oct 24, 2025

chmedlychmed

No thoughts?

OneNoneL joined the room

OneNoneL left the room

Sat, Oct 25, 2025

Ian Preston

chmedlychmed
One idea that has been a recurring thing as I try to build my next iteration of self hosted apps is the idea of hot and cold storage. But the idea is to put that in the control of the user. For instance, I sometimes upload fairly large video files that are for transfer to another person. I don't need those files to be replicated out to all the backups. And they don't need to be archived; I'm probably going to delete them once the project is over. What is important is the upload and download speed. So another way of thinking about hot-cold might be fast-slow. Or working-archive. My hope is that Peergos will eventually have the capability for multiple "storage backends" but I'm bringing it up now because I wonder... how does the current conversation about glacier storage relate to what I'm describing?

the glacier mode is just a flag for the S3 blockstore, and an write/delete/list only guarantee by our code. Once we make the pki optional it will be trivial to spin up a "user" that has whatever backing store and share that with your other users.

Ian Preston

I'm super excited about the next release. It includes two fixes that stop p2p requests being flaky, especially under load. So much much more reliable. After that I'm going to focus on a big speed up to the UI by lazy loading thumbnails and a small improvement to the cryptree design to facilitate this. Then even a directory with 10,000 things in it should load in about 5s - and most of those 5s can be parallelised later as well with another tweak to cryptree.

I didn't know this existed, and solves my main concern: https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser.html

File Chooser - XDG Desktop Portal

Description: File chooser portal The FileChooser portal allows sandboxed applications to ask the user for access to files outside the

in simple terms, i want a localsend like tool but centralized i.e. instead of local network it uses the internet. so it can bypass the vpn's lockdown mode's local network sharing block feature in retrospect, i should have wrote this as a tldr in my previous message, let me edit.

Ian Preston

Here it is: https://github.com/Peergos/web-ui/releases/tag/v1.15.0

Release Reliable P2P HTTP requests · Peergos/web-ui - GitHub

This release make p2p http requests much more reliable. It also removes all remaining client side usage of bitswap, but still enables receiver-side bitswap (the server side will be removed in a fut...

======

manual end

chmedlychmed

I think the anticipation is that peergos.net will grow exponentially in the next year. OOB object storage is probably the better option until usage demands become predictable? Just a guess.

blue.water

chmedlychmed
I think the anticipation is that peergos.net will grow exponentially in the next year. OOB object storage is probably the better option until usage demands become predictable? Just a guess.

agreed, not only scalability, but using s3 glacier bucket as a secondary storage also provides strong durability (i.e 11-nines, 9.9999..% annual durability score) which most likely the above mentioned hezner option doesn't provide. i could be wrong.

blue.water

TLDR: I want a localsend like tool but centralized i.e. instead of local network it uses the internet. so it can bypass the mullvad vpn's lockdown mode which blocks local network sharing.

hi, i have a very interesting problem-solving-case-scenario topic in my mind, that i want to discuss with all of you to understand different perspectives, if anyone's up for it?

but before, i want to make it very clear that this is NOT a feature request. and just a very hypothetical problem-solving-case-scenario thingy i have been thinking about lately.

moving on, to give you guys better context, i usually use - localsend [https://localsend.org/] to quickly share files between my devices.

for those, who don't know, it's a pretty popular tool. it's foss, cross-platform, serverless and works without internet over LAN to share files between devices on the same network, consider it an airdrop alternative that's private & local. quite handy tbh for quick transfers.
(don't quote me on this part, but from what i know, it also encrypts the file (not e2e tho) before sending them through your local network)

however one of it's greatest strength,
working offline on lan, has turned into it's no. 1 weakness lately for me, since i have started using mullvad vpn in lockdown mode - which blocks local network sharing.

does anyone of you guys have another solution that could overcome this?
what i am personally using for past some days, even though very troublesome is using sync option in peergos to automatically share files between devices and then downloading and then deleting the files from the cloud, which (a) isn't great for speed, (b) peergos backup mirror could cost more because of this (maybe, i'm not sure) and (c) isn't the most ideal solution.

now coming to the main topic, to what i am thinking lately is,
is it possible to have share-to-device thing native to peergos as a feature in which it shares some files between devices without keeping the file in cloud, as in ofcourse, it will have to upload the file to cloud first, to send to other devices, i understand that - yes, but then it doesn't upload the file to backup server and not also keep it in cloud, once the file is downloaded by the shared device, it automatically deletes the file. i mean ofcourse, it's a stretch, but a man can dream right? haha

i again would like to repeat, that this is not a feature request, and my moto of this message is to only encourage discussion, get to know different perspectives, learn about technical and other limitations, etc..

LocalSend: Share files to nearby devices

LocalSend is a free, open-source, cross-platform file sharing tool that allows you to share files to nearby devices.

blue.water

Marco
and the excuse many companies use not to support linux

for real, hopefully flatpak can help overcome this issue.
btw Ian Preston is there a technical limitation to not have peergos packaged as flatpak. from what i understand, would it not solve the problem of multiple linux peergos packages? atleast, that's how it is marketed as - sandboxed, universal linux package.

Ian Preston

In reply to
MMarco

blue.water
for real, hopefully flatpak can help overcome this issue.
btw Ian Preston is there a technical limitation to not have peergos packaged as flatpak. from what i understand, would it not solve the problem of multiple linux peergos packages? atleast, that's how it is marketed as - sandboxed, universal linux package.

I am considering flatpak yes. It is just more work. If someone wants to help figure out the flatpak permissions that let our sync client work that would help.

Marco

blue.water
TLDR: I want a localsend like tool but centralized i.e. instead of local network it uses the internet. so it can bypass the mullvad vpn's lockdown mode which blocks local network sharing.
hi, i have a very interesting problem-solving-case-scenario topic in my mind, that i want to discuss with all of you to understand different perspectives, if anyone's up for it?
but before, i want to make it very clear that this is NOT a feature request. and just a very hypothetical problem-solving-case-scenario thingy i have been thinking about lately.
moving on, to give you guys better context, i usually use - localsend [https://localsend.org/] to quickly share files between my devices.
for those, who don't know, it's a pretty popular tool. it's foss, cross-platform, serverless and works without internet over LAN to share files between devices on the same network, consider it an airdrop alternative that's private & local. quite handy tbh for quick transfers.
(don't quote me on this part, but from what i know, it also encrypts the file (not e2e tho) before sending them through your local network)
however one of it's greatest strength,
working offline on lan, has turned into it's no. 1 weakness lately for me, since i have started using mullvad vpn in lockdown mode - which blocks local network sharing.
does anyone of you guys have another solution that could overcome this?
what i am personally using for past some days, even though very troublesome is using sync option in peergos to automatically share files between devices and then downloading and then deleting the files from the cloud, which (a) isn't great for speed, (b) peergos backup mirror could cost more because of this (maybe, i'm not sure) and (c) isn't the most ideal solution.
now coming to the main topic, to what i am thinking lately is,
is it possible to have share-to-device thing native to peergos as a feature in which it shares some files between devices without keeping the file in cloud, as in ofcourse, it will have to upload the file to cloud first, to send to other devices, i understand that - yes, but then it doesn't upload the file to backup server and not also keep it in cloud, once the file is downloaded by the shared device, it automatically deletes the file. i mean ofcourse, it's a stretch, but a man can dream right? haha
i again would like to repeat, that this is not a feature request, and my moto of this message is to only encourage discussion, get to know different perspectives, learn about technical and other limitations, etc..

If the "Cloud" is you, i.e. you self host Peergos on an always on raspberry pi in your home or something like that, would that kind of work for your purposes?

In reply to
bblue.water

Ian Preston
I am considering flatpak yes. It is just more work. If someone wants to help figure out the flatpak permissions that let our sync client work that would help.

I thought one of flatpak limitations was that it's only for GUI apps, is that no longer the case?

Ian Preston

blue.water
TLDR: I want a localsend like tool but centralized i.e. instead of local network it uses the internet. so it can bypass the mullvad vpn's lockdown mode which blocks local network sharing.
hi, i have a very interesting problem-solving-case-scenario topic in my mind, that i want to discuss with all of you to understand different perspectives, if anyone's up for it?
but before, i want to make it very clear that this is NOT a feature request. and just a very hypothetical problem-solving-case-scenario thingy i have been thinking about lately.
moving on, to give you guys better context, i usually use - localsend [https://localsend.org/] to quickly share files between my devices.
for those, who don't know, it's a pretty popular tool. it's foss, cross-platform, serverless and works without internet over LAN to share files between devices on the same network, consider it an airdrop alternative that's private & local. quite handy tbh for quick transfers.
(don't quote me on this part, but from what i know, it also encrypts the file (not e2e tho) before sending them through your local network)
however one of it's greatest strength,
working offline on lan, has turned into it's no. 1 weakness lately for me, since i have started using mullvad vpn in lockdown mode - which blocks local network sharing.
does anyone of you guys have another solution that could overcome this?
what i am personally using for past some days, even though very troublesome is using sync option in peergos to automatically share files between devices and then downloading and then deleting the files from the cloud, which (a) isn't great for speed, (b) peergos backup mirror could cost more because of this (maybe, i'm not sure) and (c) isn't the most ideal solution.
now coming to the main topic, to what i am thinking lately is,
is it possible to have share-to-device thing native to peergos as a feature in which it shares some files between devices without keeping the file in cloud, as in ofcourse, it will have to upload the file to cloud first, to send to other devices, i understand that - yes, but then it doesn't upload the file to backup server and not also keep it in cloud, once the file is downloaded by the shared device, it automatically deletes the file. i mean ofcourse, it's a stretch, but a man can dream right? haha
i again would like to repeat, that this is not a feature request, and my moto of this message is to only encourage discussion, get to know different perspectives, learn about technical and other limitations, etc..

The underlying tech in peergos is designed for exactly this, so yes it is possible and a few others have requested it too, p2p device sync. The existing sync engine is agnostic and could be used with a "peer dir" implementation.

blue.water

In reply to
bblue.water

Ian Preston
I am considering flatpak yes. It is just more work. If someone wants to help figure out the flatpak permissions that let our sync client work that would help.

hi, i did some work, and this might help, the prompt given by me has the set of permission required according to me, however ai disagrees, and it might be right, i'm not a developer, i tried to compare and check all the permissions various cloud storage apps on flathub use and based on this, with the help of ai and came up with the list. https://gemini.google.com/share/813a54f9ddfc i know most of the heavylifting is done by ai, but you might still wanna check it out.

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blue.water

In reply to
bblue.water

Marco
If the "Cloud" is you, i.e. you self host Peergos on an always on raspberry pi in your home or something like that, would that kind of work for your purposes?

i don't understand but why would i want to self host peergos when i already have a subscription to peergos.net?

14 repliesIan PrestonYou could have a less limited relay on your own home server for more use cases.

blue.water

In reply to

Ian Preston

Marco
I thought one of flatpak limitations was that it's only for GUI apps, is that no longer the case?

with --talk-name=org.freedesktop.portal.Background you can run the app in background and with --talk-name=org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher you can have a system tray icon, also with --talk-name=org.freedesktop.portal.Autostart you can have the app run of startup

Ian Preston

I didn't know this existed, and solves my main concern: https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser.html

File Chooser - XDG Desktop Portal

Description: File chooser portal The FileChooser portal allows sandboxed applications to ask the user for access to files outside the sandbox. The portal backend will present the user with a file c...

Marco

In reply to
MMarco

blue.water
i don't understand but why would i want to self host peergos when i already have a subscription to peergos.net?

I probably misunderstood your main concern

blue.water

Ian Preston
I didn't know this existed, and solves my main concern: https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser.html

yeah that's what gemini says too, that instead of --filesystem=host, org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser should be used, i wasn't sure, so instead of giving you a single wrong / correct answer, i provided you with both the sides.

In reply to
bblue.water

Marco
I probably misunderstood your main concern

Marco

In reply to
MMarco

blue.water
in simple terms, i want a localsend like tool but centralized i.e. instead of local network it uses the internet. so it can bypass the vpn's lockdown mode's local network sharing block feature in retrospect, i should have wrote this as a tldr in my previous message, let me edit.

ah I see, sorry about that

blue.water

In reply to

Ian Preston

blue.water
hi, i did some work, and this might help, the prompt given by me has the set of permission required according to me, however ai disagrees, and it might be right, i'm not a developer, i tried to compare and check all the permissions various cloud storage apps on flathub use and based on this, with the help of ai and came up with the list. https://gemini.google.com/share/813a54f9ddfc i know most of the heavylifting is done by ai, but you might still wanna check it out.

hi, Ian Preston in 24 hours, the link i sent in my previous message will be automatically deleted. if the information in the link is correct and you think you might need it later, i request you to save it before it gets deleted.

Sat, Nov 8, 2025

Castle joined the room

Sunday

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yesterday

Hash

Hey! I am encountering a timeout when registering an account in peergos.net. I have not been able to figure out why.

Ian Preston

Sorry about that hash, are you the one who emailed about this?

Does it persist if you try again?

Hash

No, I did not email.

I have tried multiple times. Also with a VPN, just in case it the ISP was blocking something.

Ian Preston

Ok Let me investigate. Thank you for reporting

Hash

Here is more data:

Server response time is 10.36s for that one.

Ian Preston

Thank you. I think I see what's wrong. Give me a minute

Ok can you try again now?

Hash

Thanks Ian! Now is working. I subscribed correctly.

Ian Preston

Hash
Thanks Ian! Now is working. I subscribed correctly.

Thank you. Feel tree ask any questions here if you want to know more.

today

Ian Preston

Here it is: https://github.com/Peergos/web-ui/releases/tag/v1.15.0

Release Reliable P2P HTTP requests · Peergos/web-ui - GitHub

Marco

when you said you were excited about the next release, I thought it was a matter of weeks... maybe days knowing you... it turns out it was hours 😁

ok maybe it's the novelty effect, but it does feel significantly faster, amazing job!

Ian Preston

I don't think anything should be faster in this release (the lazy loading thing is next in queue)

Marco

opening folders that I haven't cached is really snappy right now

unfortunately now everything is cached so can't test further :P

Ian Preston

Hmm cool. I'll take it

Ian Preston

Oh actually you're right. There was one important improvement to the cache behaviour which will make dir loads faster. I forgot about that.

Marco

Ian Preston
Oh actually you're right. There was one important improvement to the cache behaviour which will make dir loads faster. I forgot about that.

Excellent, I was afraid I burned my compliment rights for the next release 😄

Gyuri Lajos IndyHub

In reply to

Jassuko

Ian Preston
The root cause here is that kubo (go-ipfs) spams everyone with requests for blocks you don't have. This amounted to about 4 Mbps of inbound traffic on our servers. Initially it was mitigated with a bloom filter. Then we added more techniques like aggressively blocking peers that spam us, but it turns out even that wasn't enough. The real solution was announcing bitswap under a different protocol id, then kubo wouldn't even try and dial us. And as of a few days ago we are ditching bitswap entirely in favour of simple p2p http requests which are more reliable.

Thanks Ian Preston for the details. I see a great potential in combining IPFS Desktop and Peergos. So there may well be gotcha's there